Many people are making the trek to visit family, friends or get the hell away from everyone with a holiday vacation. A lot of people think having an alarm is good enough and while it certainly helps, if Harry and Marv are casing the joint, they may have some tricks. It's only fair that you should have some tricks as well, right?
Here are some items that may help you rest easier as you make merry in whatever way you choose this year.
Look, I don't know about you but I'm not down with contracts. Simplisafe doesn't require a contract and has all kinds of different levels of protection you can select as well as add ons for whatever level of mechanical dragons you want guarding your fortress.
One of the easiest ways to reinforce your door from getting kicked in is replacing the screws that go into your door jamb for your lock and deadbolt with 3" screws. Even if you get a different type of reinforcement, putting these in is only icing on the cake so just do yourself a favor and do this under $10 solution.
This is an anti-kick reinforcement kit that has hinge covers. If you've had break ins in the area or you don't want to be the first on the block to start the trend, this can give some peace of mind and comes in three colors.
Not only can one of these babies be put against a door (like a side or rear door) but can also be used in a slider door. You can also travel with one to use in your hotel at night especially if you're a lady traveling solo.
Consider this like an impenetrable chain lock without the weak chain and comes in many snazzy colors. It's designed to withstand 800 lbs of pressure so between that and the 3" screws, that effer that tries to kick your door down will be writhing in pain on your porch before crawling away and you can enjoy it on...
Pretty much everyone has one of these now and we love this one in particular because it doesn't need to be hardwired. We've tried a few and they all have about the same rate of misses but this one is budget friendly and we like that we can program our own responses. For instance, if someone shows up to solicit, they will hear Doakes from Dexter say "surprise mutha f**ka, you'd better have a damn good reason for being here." If you think I'm joking, you're obviously new here. We also have a hawk sound to scare away birds and vermin. We don't have a life, give us this.
Because we had some misses with our old doorbell cam, we also have this one on the front door window. We also take one with us while we travel because once you're almost broken into in San Francisco and had another owner of the home coming in like tenants weren't renting it, you want some deterrent. This is cheap and sends alerts to your phone if it detects movement when you're gone. Tons of relief for a little bit of dough.
These babies are awesome not just to set up a timer schedule for your bedroom, kitchen, living room, etc but if you want to turn on the light in the office before entering or whatever convenience you want to set up and run via the app. We have these for both home and travel as well. Love. Them.
We got these when some jag decided to have a jingle at my car door after the Super Bowl on Valentines Day. After taking a picture of their shoeprint to plaster on every mailbox, we bought these. These babies have been going strong and go off even when cars go by further than you think would register. Because they're solar, no worries on maintenance. You just need to wipe off the top every now and then from dirt or snow to keep them functional. Even if they did poop out, they're cheap to replace.
One night when we got a notification from the above cam facing the back yard that some super douche with a flashlight went poking around on our neighbors porch in the middle of the night, we knew we had to intervene. Enter these babies. We mounted them to the back of the fence, one close to their porch and one on the other side of the fence. Because they're solar, they always have juice and because we have low standards for entertainment, when we get an after dark notification, we can't wait to watch the footage of someone walking their dog get blasted in the face with these high powered babies. FYI- flashlight creeper has never come back.
Do you watch the tube in your living room which several neighbors can catch a glimpse of? Draw the blinds and put one of these babies close-ish to the window and it comes on at dusk for 5 hours. This could also be a good thing controlled by the smart plugs if you don't want it running every night and becoming predictable.
Are you someone who comes down and throws open the blinds to start your day? Well, if someone has been casing your house, they may notice those blinds haven't moved and start getting ideas. If you'd like to retrofit your old blinds to open when you want them to, this is your gadget. Now I don't open my blinds so it would actually be sus if mine were open because we're hobbits but for you sunshiney folk, consider this to keep your blinds humming whether you're home or not without having to buy expensive new motorized blinds!
I friggin' LOVE these things and this is more for travel though they could go on a side door in a more out of sight location. There are always more points of entry in our rental than I care for so these are great for those obscure side doors. This can also work well for a hotel stop over but you absolutely need to practice unhooking it several times so Lord forbid there's a fire or something, you are able to quickly disable the lock. Also consider this is going to make it harder for emergency services to get to you if you have a medical emergency in your room. So weigh your pros and cons before using it for a hotel room.
We use or have used these products and had great success with them. They go a long way to make us feel secure both at home and when we travel. If you have any tried and true safety tips, feel free to share them!
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This list is awesome. If we hadn't curated this ourselves over the years I would have been thrilled to have all these ideas in one place.
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